Meaning and Truth
I am tired of those who would confuse meaning with truth. They are both important. Why would anyone choose one over the other? It's like choosing air over food. No amount of air will keep you fed, no amount of food will keep you breathing.
Before the subjectivity ideologues jump in to claim everything is relative, let me define my terms:
Truth is that which is universally valid.
Meaning is that which is personally valuable and thus fills a personal need.
There is no instance where there is an absence of one or the other.
There are those who equivocate and combine two together as if it were one monolithic indivisible thing. They hold this fatalistic view, calling it 'human nature' or 'that is just the way the world is' and make the mistake of confusing the actions that people take with the reasons they do them.
There is the social world and the natural or physical world. Social institutions change over time, because personal needs change over time. The idea of 'the more things change, the more they stay the same' comes from Nature, the universality of the physical world. The universal commonality acts as a stage, a common foundation for the drive of meaning to construct itself using the firm lines, limits and boundaries of the physical.
Yet the first thing anyone notices is what someone else is doing to you. That is the drama or the play of Meaning. It takes effort to look beyond the drives and needs of personal meaning to find the underlying nature.
How much detail can you recall about your trip to work? How often would you say you're on autopilot once you've been there and built up a model in your head? Building up models of that trip (or how people should act) saves time and energy instead of having to rethink from scratch. However, once they start to believe that model is more than just a model, then they waste more time and energy digging their heels rather than figuring out what could be done to improve it.
The Rules of the Play (of meaning) and the Rules of the Stage (of truth) push-pull on each other like muscle and skeleton. To ignore truth (or to name meaning as Truth) is to ignore the landmarks that tell us where we are at, where we want to be and how to change our direction to get there. To ignore meaning is deny yourself your dreams and the force that drives us forward once we have landmarks.
Before the subjectivity ideologues jump in to claim everything is relative, let me define my terms:
Truth is that which is universally valid.
Meaning is that which is personally valuable and thus fills a personal need.
There is no instance where there is an absence of one or the other.
There are those who equivocate and combine two together as if it were one monolithic indivisible thing. They hold this fatalistic view, calling it 'human nature' or 'that is just the way the world is' and make the mistake of confusing the actions that people take with the reasons they do them.
There is the social world and the natural or physical world. Social institutions change over time, because personal needs change over time. The idea of 'the more things change, the more they stay the same' comes from Nature, the universality of the physical world. The universal commonality acts as a stage, a common foundation for the drive of meaning to construct itself using the firm lines, limits and boundaries of the physical.
Yet the first thing anyone notices is what someone else is doing to you. That is the drama or the play of Meaning. It takes effort to look beyond the drives and needs of personal meaning to find the underlying nature.
How much detail can you recall about your trip to work? How often would you say you're on autopilot once you've been there and built up a model in your head? Building up models of that trip (or how people should act) saves time and energy instead of having to rethink from scratch. However, once they start to believe that model is more than just a model, then they waste more time and energy digging their heels rather than figuring out what could be done to improve it.
The Rules of the Play (of meaning) and the Rules of the Stage (of truth) push-pull on each other like muscle and skeleton. To ignore truth (or to name meaning as Truth) is to ignore the landmarks that tell us where we are at, where we want to be and how to change our direction to get there. To ignore meaning is deny yourself your dreams and the force that drives us forward once we have landmarks.